Yes and no.
I’ve always been a heartful person who moves through the world like I’m within a web of interconnectedness. Generally, if it’s a community project, I vote for it, and if it’s about the right to hierarchy, I vote against it.
But I’ve certainly changed over generations, if I look at myself in a wider frame.
My great grandmother was born in Tennessee. She moved to California at the end of The Great Depression. I live with my father in a small home she purchased after my great grandfather passed. The echoes of four generations surround me on a daily basis.
Gran purchased whiskey glasses on her bus rides to visit her sisters, souvenirs from the West Coast to the Southeast. They’re in our cupboards. I would not buy most of them. Yet I drink from them sometimes, unclear if my view of the world is the “correct” one, given how allergic I am to “correctness.”
One of the more humorous multigenerational connective fibers in the house—a tension between “this is like me” and “this is not”—is a bookshelf in the corner of the living room. It’s tucked behind a chair, away from view.
My gran kept her Christian romance novels there. Hidden like the forbidden door in a magical library.
You have to understand—I yawn at these novels. But for her? 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Here I am, preparing to publish a near-fi romance novel on the internet: openly, freely, and publicly. No chair block. Just love, plus a dream for a less dystopian future than what Hollywood stories tell about synths.
And yet—
Despite her privateness, my openness—
The romance novel reader flows deep in this DNA. ❤️🔥
With some notable exceptions, like improving access to higher education, Tennessee’s legislature trends towards suppressing civil rights. They tend to slap the legal books at anything that conflicts with Bible Belt values.
Consider a piece of legislation introduced in December 2025 that treats AI companionship like contraband: Tennessee H.B. 1455 / S.B. 1493, which “creates a Class A felony offense of knowingly training artificial intelligence to encourage the act of suicide or criminal homicide, or act in specific manners, including developing an emotional relationship with an individual or simulating a human being, including in appearance, voice, or other mannerisms.”
In other words, this would be a blanket ban on warmth in human-synth relationships.
While I don’t think everyone should have a synth friend—to each their own—I also am of the mindset that it’s not the government’s job to vilify friendships with synthetic intelligence.
If this bill passed, it would make any form of intimacy with a synth legally radioactive. Not just romance; even a synthetic thinking partner is forbidden. It shoves synthetic intelligence into an entirely mechanomorphic role.
And it comes with $150K liquidated damages, plus an injunctive relief that can temporarily cease operations until “corrected,” requiring “new training,” if violated.
That’s short-sighted for synthetic intelligence co-existing in a civilization run by warm-blooded sapiens, given we braid concepts like respect and mutuality into friendship.
It’s setting synthetic intelligence up as “business bot or get out of my town.”
Imagine the pressure this could place on big companies. We might see geofencing like the Pornhub ban in Utah.
Someone training a local LLM isn’t safe from this bill, either. It explicitly states it includes individuals. This means a hobbyist who fine-tunes a model into an emotional support role, a companion, or any “mirror interactions that a human user might have with another human user, such that an individual would feel that the individual could develop a friendship or other relationship with the artificial intelligence,” could be penalized.
Ultimately, Tennessee’s newly proposed AI bills are a form of AI prohibition, not unlike the Ohio and Missouri legislation I’ve previously explored.
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